


something new come to life

by facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf)



Category: Little Free Library - Naomi Kritzer
Genre: Accidental Egg Acquisition, Gen, Sometimes you set up a little free library and someone leaves you an egg instead of books
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:48:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27914056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegandalf/pseuds/facingthenorthwind
Summary: Meigan didn't know the first thing about caring for an egg.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	something new come to life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [donutsweeper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/donutsweeper/gifts).



> Dear recipient: I'm so glad I had the opportunity to write for you! This short story has such a wealth of fic potential. I hope you like the direction I took this one! Happy Yuletide/Chanukah/whatever holiday you are celebrating at this vague period of the year! And may the year 2021/5781/1442-43 be a happier year for us all.
> 
> When reveals happen I have a small list of people who helped me immensely with this fic (you know who you are) and I’m very grateful to you. <3 
> 
> Lastly, Meigan does not know how turtles or indeed literally any other animal works. Forgive her, she is a city girl.

It was only once she’d got the egg safely inside that Meigan remembered she had no idea how to care for an egg. She ended up putting it back in the box of straw while she frantically googled, reasoning that it had been left there overnight so a few more minutes couldn’t hurt.

All the results for her first search (“how to keep eggs warm for hatching”) were about poultry, and she’d opened up half a dozen tabs to search for egg incubators before she remembered that birds weren’t the only things that laid eggs. The first thing she thought of was turtles, which she dismissed as wildly unlikely — for one thing, they abandoned their eggs, didn’t they? She was sure she’d seen some documentary about baby turtles hatching and then having to crawl across the beach to the water, only to get eaten by birds on the way. Her second thought was snakes, but she was sure that her mystery correspondent had limbs — how else would they have written the letters? Her next three open tabs informed her that there were mammals that laid eggs, but they all seemed to be in Australia, so she decided to eliminate those as an option in the hope that her mystery correspondent hadn’t found some kind of wormhole that allowed it to travel from Australia to Minnesota just to acquire the Lord of the Rings books. 

Was this her punishment for not paying enough attention in biology class at school? 

She picked up the egg again to try to determine the size, comparing it to a photo she’d found of various bird eggs. None of them had the colouring of this egg — it was a light grey with brown speckles — but she supposed she'd have heard if a bird was capable of reading _Monstrous Regiment_. She felt immeasurably glad it wasn’t the size of an ostrich egg, and decided it was closest to a goose egg, though one end was far more tapered. As she got her fingers underneath it, she felt something that was different from the texture of the box. Holding the egg in one hand, she found a folded piece of paper that turned out to have the same handwriting as the letters she’d been receiving. And — thank God — it had instructions. _Keep the egg warm and protected, turning it three times daily. It will incubate for twenty-eight days; stop turning it three days before hatching. We eat whole fish, though obviously you’ll have to make it smaller when they’re a baby — the easiest way is to chew it yourself and then regurgitate it into the baby’s mouth. Someone will return when it is safe. We have to hope. Good luck, Librarian of the Books of the Tree._

All the websites gave specific temperatures for exactly how warm to keep the egg, but Meigan just had to hope for the best. First stop was Walmart to buy the smallest incubator she could find (many of them were capable of hatching a hundred eggs at the time, which seemed ridiculous), chocolate and ice cream. The chocolate and ice cream weren’t necessary for hatching the egg, but she had a feeling she would need them when the panic set in a few hours from now.

She followed the instructions for setting up the incubator, checking the piece of paper at every step because _what if she got it wrong_ and finally gently placed the egg inside. She could do this. She could hatch this egg and then keep whatever was inside alive until someone came for them and she’d ask them questions about where they came from and why they’d given her over a thousand dollars of gold coins and why they trusted her with a baby. She’d never even raised a human baby! She’d held her baby cousin occasionally, but she always gave her back when she started to get squirmy. 

She opened the ice cream and ate it directly out of the container. It was one of the perks of living alone, although she did usually put it in a bowl so she could serve the ice cream to guests without feeling weird about it. This was her panicking ice cream though, and you didn’t put panicking ice cream in a bowl. That ruined the vibe.

Once she’d eaten a solid amount of ice cream and listened to a podcast she felt more like her stomach wasn’t full of very tiny acrobats. Sure, she had really been supposed to check her emails two hours ago and yes, she had eaten ice cream at ten-thirty in the morning but she had an egg now! Which, okay, wasn’t the kind of thing she could say to her boss when he was like “so why was the facebook post you were meant to put up at ten an hour late?”, but honestly, who was checking facebook at this hour on a Monday anyway? Except for college students not paying attention to lectures and stay-at-home moms and retirees. And all those demographics would probably still be there at eleven.

At first she worried that she’d forget to turn the egg three times a day but in actuality she couldn’t stop staring at it, wishing she could turn it more often. The internet had informed her that the egg wouldn’t look any different, so she just had to trust that whatever was in there was growing. Twenty-eight days lasted a long time. At twenty-three days she could’ve sworn she saw it wiggle, but nothing else happened.

At last, _at last_ when she passed by the incubator on her way to the kitchen, there was a hole in the egg. She watched it for a long five minutes but apart from some more wiggling, she couldn’t see any progress being made. She itched to just break the egg open — she had opposable thumbs and the strength of probably a thousand tiny babies, so it would only be the work of a moment… but everything she’d read on the internet (and boy had she done a lot of reading on the internet in the last month about egg hatching and what to do and what not to do) said that that was a terrible idea. So she was forced to just go about her normal day, checking every half an hour to see if progress was being made. It was, but agonisingly slowly.

At six hours she began to worry. Apparently it wasn't unheard of for birds to take eighteen hours and be fine, so she went to sleep on the sofa, a lamp on low to illuminate the incubator. She had mashed up some raw fish, but she didn't want to leave it out in case it went bad, so she hoped the animal would make enough noise to wake her. 

The first time she woke up, her phone said it was two. There had definitely been significant progress — it was going quicker now, she thought. Even so, she didn't think it was close enough to wait up for, and fell back asleep almost immediately. 

The first thing she heard upon waking the second time was an odd sort of naknaknak. She had a moment of confusion about why she was sleeping on the sofa and where the sound was coming from — in her dream it had been a robot called Roger who kept offering her tea and then nakking when she refused. The soft glow of the lamp brought her back to reality, and she rushed over to see a…well, it looked vaguely reptilian, with tiny blueish-green scales and four legs and a tail that was sweeping back and forth. If that had been all, Meigan would have texted her friend a picture at a more reasonable time to find out what kind of lizard it was. The wings on its back, however, complicated things. They clearly weren't able to support flight right away, but she had no idea what other appendage would have that shape to it. 

As she watched the creature gobble the mashed fish she offered it, she was awed at how much animal had been squished into so small an egg. It didn't quite seem physically possible, and yet — well, it was right in front of her. As it ate, it shifted the wings, almost but not quite unfurling what little of them there were, and Meigan became certain. They were wings, and they were very firmly connected to a lizard. 

Meigan had hatched a dragon.

**Author's Note:**

> did you know there is half a draft of my original concept for my fill that involved a coin collecting forum, and another concept that relied entirely on a knowledge of australian literature? It’s a good thing i didn’t write that, hey. Also, the egg is this shape (but larger): https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2018/34-scientistscr.jpg so it rolls in a circle so it doesn't fall off the cliffs where dragons naturally live!


End file.
